Social animals are generally under pressure from aggressive interactions exhibited to maintain or access to social dominance. In intensive farming aquaculture, social fish are exposed to constant social interactions because individuals are not allowed to choose between fighting or not, and may have few opportunities to flight. The social isolation, on the other hand, reduces the pressure of interactions, but it is also stressful for several species. Knowing that fish have preferences for specific conditions (both physical and social), remaining within their preferences is a primary requirement for the animal welfare. Thus, having opportunity to choice between keep fighting or socially isolation would be a condition of reducing social stress for these species. Therefore, our goal was to test whether social fish choose environments with higher or lower social pressure and whether such a choice is related to the animal stress. Adult Nil tilapia (a social cichlid fish) males were addressed to five treatments (N = 14 each) with different levels of social pressures. In each treatment, aquaria was divided in two compartments (by a plastic partition) within fish could choose to remain. Each part had mirrors as virtual conspecifics or had not mirrors, as follows: 1. Social isolation (0 x 0 mirrors); constant social pressure (1 x 1; 3 x 1 mirrors), not constant social pressure (1 x 0; 0 x 3 mirrors). Fish were video-recorded (four 15 min-session) along um day to record the time spent in each compartment, the frequency of crossing in between compartments, and frequency of aggressive interaction (attacks and displays) with fish mirror image. Plasma cortisol level was assayed (ELISA) to infer stress level. We observed that fish remained longer in places with three mirrors, wherein they also showed the largest number of attacks and displays. Such a choice can be associated to a greater likelihood of loss ...